According to the National Survery of Drug Use and Health roughly 25.8 million people have admitted to using cannabis a.k.a marijuana at one point in their lifetime and 15.2 million have admitted to using it in the past month. With this staggering amount of people using this drug it has the potential to create a 10 billion dollar tax revenue for our country. On November 2nd of this year (2010) Proposition 19 was put on the ballot to be voted on for legalization of marijuana in California. This proposition was voted down with 54 percent voting No and 46 percent voting Yes. However with so many people using this drug and the potential money it could bring in being so high, why hasn't our government legalized marijuana yet?
Well there are always two sides to the story.
Lets explore marijuana's pros and cons before you decide what should be done about the drug. First off the pros, if the drug would be legalized then our police forces could focus their efforts on arresting more serious criminal offenders, such as rapists and murderers. With marijuana being an underground drug there is potential for the product to be tampered with before people use it, if legalized the FDA would be able to regulate the quality of the drug making it safer for people to use. Lastly, large drug cartels would ultimately lose business because states could cultivate their own plants. This could decrease drug related crimes and murders happening in our country.
Now the cons. Marijuana is often used by most people as a gateway drug to more dangerous drugs such as cocaine and heroine. Legalizing marijuana would also raise the amount of car accidents that occur while being high. This would also increase the likelihood of younger kids getting ahold of the drug at an earlier age similar to problems we face with alcohol nowadays.
With the pros and cons, what is your stance on the legalization of marijuana? Is there any hope for it being legalized in our country? Or is marijuana doomed to be forever illegal?
Marijuana will remain illegal. The drug simple has to many implications that would hurt our country’s economy and society. If it were legal Mexican drug cartels would increase their production of the drug. Their profits would be enormous since more people are buying the drug. With these profits their growing and smuggling operations would become highly advanced. This would make it impossible for the FDA to regulate the quality of all the marijuana in the country.
ReplyDeleteThe police would have their hands full with crimes related to marijuana. Drug wars, murder, and homicide would become common to our everyday lives if the drug were legalized. I think legalizing the drug would only set our country back because we’d have to many people that would just want to get high all the time. Besides with the amount of regulations our government has been placing on tobacco products its unlikely that marijuana will ever become legal.